Anybody following tech media in the past few years would instantly recognize the Thorne. He's a fanboy. That is, the kind of crazily obsessed tech enthusiast who appears to have become unhinged somewhere between peeling off his smartphone's screen protector and making his 457th comment on Android Central. He seems to love - as in, romantically love - his phone. He explodes with rage when somebody says anything less than glowingly positive about it.

I've been dealing with fanboys for as long as I'm an OSNews editor - made worse by the fact that I don't really have a strong allegiance to any platform, and therefore, tend to criticise and praise each of them at the same time, on a weekly basis. This means I have to deal with all manner of fanboys, and while it sometimes can be quite tiring, it's just kind of adorable most of the time.

The other side of the coin is being accused of being biased for or against something. I used to maintain a list of all the companies and products I was accused of being biased for or against. Interestingly enough, all of the companies and products mentioned appeared in both the biased for and biased against column. In other words, I was biased for and against every single company and product mentioned on OSNews at the same time.

In the meantime, out in the real world, I try to use as many different products from as many different companies as (financially) possible, so that I gather as much as real-world experience as I can. So, in the past 18-24 months, I've bought a Nexus 7, HTC 8X Windows Phone, Surface RT, iMac, Find 5 (Android), a self-built Windows 8 PC, Nokia E7 (Symbian), iPhone 5S, Jolla, and only last week I added a Nokia N9 to my collection. On top of that, I've used a whole bunch of other classic devices to further expand my horizon. I love technology, regardless of brand or platform.

So yes, I've probably had more experience with fanboys than just about anyone here on OSNews. However, the things I've had to deal with are minute compared to the things people like Joshua Topolsky from The Verge has had to deal with.

The gist of this somewhat random collection of words: be happy OSNews is a relatively small, niche site. Sure, we get into our (in the grand scheme of things, pointless) debates, but at least virtually every regular commenter here displays a reasonable amount of intelligence and restraint. We could do a whole lot worse.

It's mostly a holdover from when Microsoft was much more powerful than today, and pretty clearly was holding personal computing back in pursuit of its business goals. A lot of techies from my era (I'm in my early 40s) have a lot of lingering resentment. But at this point, there's no real rationality to it.

Truth is, since the release of Windows 7, most of Microsoft's major products are pretty good (including the mostly-excellent .NET ecosystem). All of us old-time Microsoft-haters get a nice dose of schadenfreude whenever a big new MS initiative like Bing or Windows Phone fails to catch on, just like you might get a jolt of self-satisfaction seeing your old middle school bully working in some low-status profession.